APNewsBreak: Senators mull tougher Iran sanctions

Iranian shopkeeper Masoud Hatami works at a home appliance store in Tehran, Iran, Thursday, Nov. 8, 2012. Sanctions-hit Iran has banned the import of foreign-made cars, laptops, and other 'luxury' goods in the hope of saving billions of dollars in hard currency, a state-owned newspaper reported Thursday. IRAN daily listed 75 products, from watches, home appliances and cell phones to coffee and toilet paper, that it said could no longer be purchased from abroad. But it says the ban does not apply to components used to produce the products. Iranian firms assemble many products including watches, laptops and cell phones. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
— AP

Iranian shopkeeper Masoud Hatami works at a home appliance store in Tehran, Iran, Thursday, Nov. 8, 2012. Sanctions-hit Iran has banned the import of foreign-made cars, laptops, and other 'luxury' goods in the hope of saving billions of dollars in hard currency, a state-owned newspaper reported Thursday. IRAN daily listed 75 products, from watches, home appliances and cell phones to coffee and toilet paper, that it said could no longer be purchased from abroad. But it says the ban does not apply to components used to produce the products. Iranian firms assemble many products including watches, laptops and cell phones. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
/ AP

WASHINGTON 
Lawmakers are working on a set of new and unprecedented sanctions against Iran that could prevent the Islamic republic from doing business with most of the world until it agrees to international constraints on its nuclear program, officials say.

The bipartisan financial and trade restrictions amount to a "complete sanctions regime" against Tehran, according to one congressional aide involved in the process. The tougher constraints could put the Obama administration in a difficult position with allies who are still trading with Iran, but whom the U.S. needs to secure a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff.

On Thursday, in its first foreign policy announcement since the president's re-election, the administration targeted four Iranian officials and five organizations with sanctions for jamming satellite broadcasts and blocking Internet access for Iranian citizens.

But the measures that Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., want to attach to a defense bill would be far more sweeping. They would target everything from Iranian assets overseas to all foreign goods that the country imports, building on the tough sanctions package against Tehran's oil industry that the two lawmakers pushed through earlier this year, according to congressional aides and people involved in the process, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorize to discuss the issue publicly. Those earlier measures already have cut Iran's petroleum exports in half and hobbled its economy.

Yet even as the value of its currency has dropped precipitously against the dollar in a year, sparking an economic depression and massive public discontent, Iran's leadership has yet to bite on an offer from world powers to ease current sanctions in exchange for several compromises over its nuclear program. To break the logjam, the administration is brainstorming ways to make the proposal more attractive for the Iranians without granting any new concessions that would reward the regime for its intransigence, according to administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Escalating the sanctions, the measure's supporters say, could accelerate the point to which the Iranian economy is bankrupt, forcing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to give ground in the nuclear negotiations. Supporters say they hope Iran's oil-inflated foreign currency reserves are depleted before it has the capacity to produce nuclear weapons-grade material, which Israel and others say could be as soon as August 2013.

The United States and other world powers have been trying to gauge whether a negotiated solution is possible with Iran. Washington and many of its European and Arab partners fear Iran is trying to develop nuclear warheads, even if Iran insists that the program is solely designed for peaceful energy and medical research purposes. The Obama administration says military options should only be a last resort and has pressed Israel to hold off on any plans for a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.

But tensions between the U.S. and Iran remain high, a fact underlined by the Pentagon's revelation Thursday that an Iranian military plane fired on, but missed, an unarmed U.S. drone aircraft a week ago. The incident occurred in international airspace over the Persian Gulf, Pentagon spokesman George Little said. Prominent Iranian lawmaker Mohammad Saleh Jokar told the state-owned yjc.ir news website on Friday that Iranian fighters shot at the U.S. drone because it had entered Iranian airspace.